The world's fastest web browser is Internet Explorer 9

Windows users can also benefit from the world's second fastest web browser, the latest Windows verson of Chrome, with Facebook's speed test suite confirming "the Windows version of Google's upcoming Chrome 10 in second place".

For advanced client web apps using HTML5 and JavaScript, exemplified by the next-generation of games based on rich web client technology, Internet Explorer 9 is the best browser available -- by far. But still, nothing beats the performance of web apps developed using Silverlight, which combines GPU hardware acceleration with a much faster run-time environment than JavaScript can offer at this point in time.

Hi Pragnesh, yes IE9 was the fastest web browser (by far) in the key benchmark cited as the example, and illustrated by the bar-graph, on Facebook's official note about their JSGameBench performance testing suite for client web apps. And JSGameBench represents a whole suite of tests. If you have other specific benchmarks that we could compare between browsers, I'd be interested to see them. Obviously for next-gen HTML/JavaScript games with HTML5, the animated sprites benchmark shown in the chart is fundamental. :)

Jay wrote: "IE9 hasn't exactly been released yet. Also, standard benchmarks like Kraken and SunSpider show Chrome to still beat IE9. It does well as being faster than Firefox though."

HTML5 hasn't been released yet, either, it's still a draft, but that doesn't dissuade Google and Apple and their fan communities from disingenuously criticising old versions of IE for not adopting it!

Benchmarks like like Kraken and SunSpider? We don't yet have any results for the latest IE9 release candidate in these benchmarks, so we can't compare. Clearly, though, Google actively taylors Chrome to look good in certain benchmarks, and such a lame strategy might impress the average user but web developers are less impressed. These benchmarks test the very simplest isolated operations and DOM manipulations and are not a realistic representation of what current web applications are doing.